Notes

Starting a new list, one that gathers together some handy eleventy templates from which you can start a new website project or even take some ideas from:

• https://github.com/google/eleventy-high-performance-blog

Do you have any favourites you’d like to share?

Some other useful links:

• https://www.filamentgroup.com/lab/build-a-blog/
• https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2021/03/eleventy-static-site-generator/
• https://daily-dev-tips.com/

Just a little update on how things are going. Recently passed my probation with Vixio. Working on some updates for the vixio.com website. Soon shall be writing some more content for this site, mainly about CSS and maybe photography. Taking the week off next week and we are both looking forward to it MASSIVELY!

I created my Notes section to create a micro-blogging section on my site and wanted to figure out a way of adding hashtags or mentions to them. If I write this hashtag #jamstag like this, does it translate to the tweet or do I need to do it differently?

I have been running Ubuntu on my work computer for around 3 months now and I absolutely love it. I am tempted to install it on my own Mac. I love MacOS but I think I may love Ubuntu a bit more, so is it worth running a dual boot? I have 1Tb that I could divide up? Or is a VM Ubuntu worth the trouble?

Animating stat counters

One of the tasks I had this week was to find a way of animating stats on the homepage of our company website. You know the kind of thing, you see them on quite a lot of sites. It is all about the big reveal, as the user reveals more of your content, animation brings colour and sparkle to your presentation. I had a little look around online and this Codepen certainly seems to do the trick for me. I will share the final results once we relaunch the website later this summer :-)

https://codepen.io/veremey/pen/oNgbpKP

Find a file by wildcard

Let’s imagine you’ve a tonne of log files in a directory that are eating up space, you want to find those that are older than two months and then potentially delete those in order to keep just the recent ones…

find . -mtime +60 -name "wp-load.*" where we needed to list the files starting with a certain name and that are older than 60 days, in other words we only wanted to keep the most recent log files.

To delete these, we would need to add the -delete flag to this command. Does it work though? is a sudo necessary?

File Count

Recently I was looking for a way of counting files in a directory:

ls -la | wc -l returns a file count and that is how we discovered there were 379k log files in the home directory today (for one of our systems)!

Going Electric?

Today we visited the EV Experience Centre in Milton Keynes and took a good look at Volkswagen’s new ID.4 SUV. They are so spacious inside and you can really stretch out, a bonus for tall passengers! My wife and I are of average height but the people we tend to transport are always very tall!

I can’t say (yet) how the car drives but it is certainly on our list of vehicles we are considering along with:

• Tesla
• Hyundai Ioniq 5
• Kia e-Niro
• Nissan Ariya
• Skoda Enyaq
• Jaguar i-pace

A number of companies will let you hire their vehicles for a few days, so that you can make an informed decision on which car is the best match for your needs.

Greywell Tunnel

Last weekend I explored the “last five miles” of the Basingstoke Canal, the section on the other side of the Greywell Tunnel. My aim was to walk to the western portal of the tunnel, having visited the more well known eastern side, so many times over the years, I had never found the other.

It was a lovely walk, the verdant colours of spring making their annual debut, the banks of the canal under a blanket of wild garlic, not yet in bloom. The towpath cobbled and uneven, nature winning over the old section of the canal.

The tunnel collapsed in the 1930’s, the canal had fallen into financial problems by this point and as a result it ceased commercial use. It is now home to hundreds of rare bat species and as such, it is protected.

I took a peek through the fencing and could see into the tunnel a little bit, there a couple of small rowing boats in there that I doubt have been touched in a very long time.

I’ve fallen behind a bit on my blogging and not keeping these notes recently. I hope to play catch up in the coming days!

Slades Bridge

Slade’s Bridge in Up Nately, Hampshire was originally built in 1790 it provided access to the Nateley Brickworks on the Northern side of the Basingstoke canal.

A little research into the brickworks was interesting - In 1895 after eight years in the hands of the official receiver, the canal was bought by Sir Frederick Seager Hunt, who formed the Woking, Aldershot & Basingstoke Canal & Navigation Company Ltd. Sir Fred was a Tory MP but made his living as a gin distiller.

It was when the Army camps in Aldershot, Deepcut and Pirbright were being upgraded, that large quantities of bricks were needed. Sir Frederick bought a small brickworks in Up Nateley, spent a lot of money on expanding it to create the Hampshire Brick and Tile Company.

A 100-yard arm was dug near Slades bridge to allow boats to load bricks and unload coal to fire the kilns. Around 50 tons of coal was transported here from Basingstoke every week, which ironically was delivered there by rail!

Eventually the business went into liquidation after a 14 week closure of the canal at Woking which impacted the business. It was also said that the clay was unsatisfactory and the bricks too poor for building work.

Photographed using Halide and edited in Darkroom, using my iPhone and iPad for editing. I love this modern workflow!

Does anyone know if any of the old brickworks buildings still exist?